Patron saint of nurses

Nursing is one of the oldest works of mercy, and the Church has honored it from the beginning: "I was sick, and you visited me," Christ says of the last judgment. The saints who are patrons of nurses did the work themselves. They emptied basins, carried patients on their backs, sat with the dying through plague and flood, and asked for what every good nurse still gives. St. Camillus called it "More heart."

St. Camillus and St. John of God, the patron saints of nurses

In 1930 Pope Pius XI named St. Camillus de Lellis and St. John of God the principal co-patrons of nurses and nursing associations. Forty-four years earlier, in 1886, Leo XIII had made them heavenly patrons of the sick and of hospitals and put both names in the litany for the dying. They are the official answer, and their lives explain it.

St. Camillus de Lellis

Camillus was born in 1550 in the Abruzzo, grew up to be a head taller than everyone around him, and spent his youth as a soldier of fortune and a compulsive gambler. At twenty-five he was converted. An ulcer on his leg that never healed sent him to the Hospital of St. James for the Incurables in Rome as a patient; he stayed on as a nurse and became master of the house.

Hospital attendants in those days were often hired men or petty criminals working off sentences. Camillus wanted men who would serve the sick, in his words, "with the same loving kindness that mothers usually show towards their sick children." His favorite cry to his helpers was "More heart, I want to see more maternal affection," or "More soul in the hands." The Camillians call him the founder of nursing, pointing to his Rules for Serving the Sick Well.

On the advice of St. Philip Neri he became a priest, and around 1584 he founded the Ministers of the Sick, whose members bound themselves by vow to serve the sick, even those with plague, at the risk of their lives. Two of the first members died nursing plague victims on a quarantined fleet at Naples. The large red cross they wore on their habits, granted by Pope Sixtus V, is still the badge of the Camillians, and it is the red cross on many nurses' medals today. Camillus died in Rome on July 14, 1614. His feast is July 14, kept on July 18 in the United States.

St. John of God

John of God was a Portuguese shepherd, soldier and traveling bookseller who, after a dramatic conversion in Granada, spent his last thirteen years caring for the sick poor of that city. He rented a house, furnished it with what he could beg, and went through the streets looking for sick people with nowhere to go, carrying on his back those who couldn't walk. By day he nursed them; by night he begged for food and supplies.

In July 1549 fire broke out in Granada's Royal Hospital. John ran in and carried and led out the sick. He died the next year, on his birthday, March 8, 1550, and his companions became the Brothers Hospitallers of St. John of God, one of the largest Catholic health-care orders in the world. Their emblem is a pomegranate topped by a cross, for the city of Granada.

Other patron saints of nurses

St. Agatha

St. Agatha, the young martyr of Catania who died around 251, is the oldest patron of nurses. Her legend says that when the governor Quintianus ordered her breasts cut off, she rebuked him for mutilating in a woman what had nursed him as a child. From that story she became the patron of nurses and wet nurses, as well as of women with breast cancer. The patronage is traditional. Her feast is February 5.

St. Catherine of Siena

St. Catherine of Siena is best known as a mystic, a Doctor of the Church and the woman who persuaded a pope to return to Rome. But she also worked in Siena's hospitals, including the great hospital of Santa Maria della Scala facing the cathedral, and when plague returned to Siena in 1374 she stayed and nursed the dying. Nurses and the sick claim her for that reason.

St. Elizabeth of Hungary

St. Elizabeth of Hungary was a king's daughter and the wife of the ruler of Thuringia. During the famine and plague of 1226 she built a hospital with 28 beds below the Wartburg and visited it every day. Widowed at twenty, she joined the Third Order of St. Francis and spent her last three years nursing the sick in the hospital she founded at Marburg, where she died in 1231 at twenty-four. She is the patron of hospitals and nurses. Her feast is November 17.

St. Raphael and St. Margaret

St. Raphael the Archangel, whose name means "God heals," is asked to pray for the sick, for physicians and for nurses, and many Catholic hospitals carry his name. St. Margaret of Antioch, the patron of women in labor, appears on Catholic Culture's list of patrons of nurses as well; her legend says she was raised by a Christian nurse. Both are popular patronages rather than formal decrees.

A prayer for nurses

The words nurses have always taken to heart are Christ's own, from the parable of the last judgment (Matthew 25:35-36, Douay-Rheims):

For I was hungry, and you gave me to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me to drink; I was a stranger, and you took me in: Naked, and you covered me: sick, and you visited me: I was in prison, and you came to me.

The Church's own prayer for the feast of St. Camillus, from the Roman Missal, asks God for "a spirit of love" so that, "serving you in our neighbor," we may pass safely to Him at the hour of our death; the full text is on St. Camillus's page, and the prayer for St. John of God is on his page. Camillus himself died, Catholic Culture records, with the prayer for the dying on his lips: "May the face of Christ Jesus shine gloriously upon you."

Let us ask St. Camillus and St. John of God to pray for every nurse starting a shift tonight, and for the patients in their care. You can find more on our patron saint of healing page and our patron saints page.